“No more game purchases till I achieve 100% or Platinum on all of the games I’ve purchased,” is the goal, and while renting should keep me up to date as far as the newest Playstation going ons, I’ve just realized that PSN games mean no renting available.

Super Stardust Portable, I’ll see you in 2010. Maybe.

In good news this week, I finally received my first Platinum Trophy for completing 100% of the Trophy challenges in Call of Duty: World at War. Yay!

Call of Duty: World at War: 100%
Continuing from last week, I decided I needed a break from slugging it through the game on Veteran, so I switched modes and went gunning for, what I call “stunt Trophies,” things like “Shoot 3 enemies with one bullet,” and the like. The one that gave me the most trouble involved pistol shooting someone from sniper range. I’ve done stuff like it before in other games, but in this situation, the target was so small, and holding the gun up to aim pretty much covered him from my view. A glitch that gave me way more ammo than I should have had may have helped me out on this one.

But what glitch giveth, glitch can take away as my save game from just after my two hour battle to the first checkpoint in “Relentless” mysteriously decided not to work anymore (something about not being compatible with my version of the game.), sending me back to the beginning to try it all over again. Sucked, but by the end of that level, I think I learned something. COD on Veteran is less like a modern video game and more like real life.

Last week, I decided that I wasn’t going to buy anymore games until I achieved Platinum or 100% Trophies on all of my current games. A bit more than a week later, how’s it going? Well, I am a bit sad that I won’t be playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix for a while, but my resolve has held intact despite Black Friday’s temptations. As far as progress goes, here’s some snippets of the thoughts I’ve had so far:

Call of Duty: World at War: 50%
I need to complete all of the levels of Veteran (the highest difficulty), which, at this point, should get me another 11 Trophies closer to the finish. I know that a lot of reviewers dinged Resistance 2 for enemies in the single player that seem to ignore everyone except you., but the problem is much worse in COD. So much so that often, it is very hard to tell whicc guys are on your side. At least in Resistance, the enemies are clearly not human. In COD, it’s not too rare to see two guys, on opposing sides, shooting in different directions while standing right next to each other. Of course, the moment I’m within range, the bad one immediately turns on me and kills me before I can exclaim, “that guy’s not on my te–?”

Still, I trudge on. Three nights ago, it took me two hours to get to the first checkpoint in the level, “Relentless.” So. Many. Bad guys.

It’s a weird feeling when suddenly games that don’t have Trophies suddenly feel like they aren’t worth playing, as if being able to carry over your achievements from one game to the next has some sort of physically value that can be perserved in the vast spaces of he interweb. Whatever the reason, I am once again hooked on Trophies (and other such systems). With the economy, and my personal economics, the way they are, the time for Trophies is now.

Even without the value arguments, Trophies extent the life of a game by offering that little bit of incentive to scrape up every last speck of frosting at the bottom of the cereal box, so to speak. Always fun? No. Getting every bit your money’s worth? Yes.

So from now until it’s done, before InFamous (hopefully), I will be going for Platinum on every game I own, forgoing the purchase of any new games until this feat is accomplished. The road will be rough, and I can’t imagine how I’m going to complete Warhawk, but in the end, I’ll be a better gamer and a little richer too.

See you on PSN.

Originally published on Playstation Underground Gamer Advisory Panel (GAP) 2008-11-18 12:05.